Nature • History • Culture • Recreation

The Universe of Recreation Stakeholders

When doing recreation planning, it’s always easiest to harvest most of our input from those well-known realms of resource providers and advocacy organizations. Of course we must consult the public as best we can, generally through surveys and public meetings. Unfortunately, The Public is huge, diverse, and widely spread out. It’s tempting to limit ourselves to taking snapshots here and there and extrapolating like crazy (often described as something like “robust efforts to provide for public participation.”) But really get the grassroots engaged in the process, and you can produce a quantum leap in the accuracy and political clout of the final product.

Recently a group of state recreation planners wanted to do just that. They challenged me to produce a comprehensive picture of the whole universe of stakeholders for recreation issues and interests of all kinds. I decided it would help to show fundamental relationships among the various types, as in a taxonomy. Asking myself “what would Tufte do?” (see Edward Tufte on this site’s Expert Resources page) I managed to cook up the following (click the image for a larger version):